WINDOW SIZES ARTICLE, PAGE 2

And the issue is not the size of your page elements, either

I don't believe that it should be the web designer's concern that there are people with 21" monitors set at 800 x 600, whose display shows page elements at a huge size. Other users will have a setup in which page elements appear at a very small size; this is their choice, and not our responsibility, or even our business, to adjust or fix.

The desktop of a certain real person I know, showing a browser window sized at about 770 pixels

Browser width diversity awareness training

You may be one of those people who keeps the browser window maximized at all times, even on your larger, higher-resolution monitor. Well, it's a free country, and you're welcome to do that, but you need to be aware that this is by no means typical. Many people size their browser window somewhat smaller than full-screen. For instance, on monitors set to a 1,024 x 768 resolution, it is common to keep the browser window closer to 700-800 pixels wide, for a number of reasons, some of which we'll discuss below.

As computers continue to be put on the market with larger monitors and higher resolution settings, this practice is becoming more and more common.

The stats below show that this is the case; browser window widths are spread over the range of sizes, and don't fall into 2 or 3 or 4 neat categories, by any means.

So the issue is browser window width?

Yes. The issue isn't monitor size or monitor resolution - it's browser window width. And the truth is that there are almost as many browser window widths being used as there are people. Well, not quite as many, but you get the point.

Just to further complicate things, many users leave the browser manufacturer's "feature bars" open - those vertical left-hand bars that display Favorites or other internet-related information deemed to be important enough to take up valuable real estate. Some browsers install with these feature bars displayed by default, and there are many people who would never even think about closing them. So whatever the size of their browser window, these folks have a big chunk less viewport than they would otherwise - horizontally, where it really matters.

When reading text, size matters

When pages are mostly text, there's a limit to how wide the content can stretch and still be readable. Having the content stretch across the entire screen is not always ideal. As monitors get bigger, there's a tendency to assume that browser windows will be kept bigger and bigger, as if bigger is always better. But when dealing with text-based pages, this is just not the case. Text is much more readable when the lines are of a reasonable length, perhaps about 10-20 average-length words per line.

There are reasons why humans have developed the common 8 ½" x 11" paper page with its 12-point type: for the average person, this is a readable type size and length of lines. As our monitors get bigger and bigger, many of us will be finding that it makes good sense to keep browser windows, and other program windows, at much less than maximized, to provide these ideal line-lengths.

The bottom line: it takes all kinds

The bottom line is that many people use non-standard window sizes. There are simply not 3 or 4 resolution settings to design for - instead, there are hundreds of browser-window widths.

So you need to design pages keeping in mind that there are lots of different browser window widths. The idea of tailoring your web pages to an exact size, or perhaps two exact sizes, is based on fallacies and is simply a waste of time; you need to design pages which look good at many different window sizes.

Continued: The truth is out there... -->